Bruises
by orangeflavor
Summary: "This frantic haze will lift one day, and they will part – perhaps slowly, perhaps with waning affection. Like a bruise, the stain of their lust will fade until her flesh is free of him entirely. Like he'd never been there at all." - Jon and Sansa. They carry the ache with them.


Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money.

Author's Note: **For LadyAlice101.** Jon and Sansa have a night together on the eve of the Battle of the Bastards. It all goes downhill from there. Soft E. Dark. Season 7 AU.

Bruises

_"This frantic haze will lift one day, and they will part – perhaps slowly, perhaps with waning affection. Like a bruise, the stain of their lust will fade until her flesh is free of him entirely._

_Like he'd never been there at all."_ -

Jon and Sansa. They carry the ache with them.

They reach for each other like practiced pain – like pressing on a bruise.

An affirmation of survival.

She doesn't know how they got here, with her skirts hiked up around her waist, her legs locked around his hips, her back scraping against one of the beams inside his tent as he ruts into her, his mouth at her throat. She claws at the beam for purchase, something to steady herself against his furious thrusts.

They do not kiss.

Sansa wonders if that is more cruel than kind this night.

She doesn't have long to think on it though, because his grunts are growing louder in her ear, his thrusts uneven, the heat of his mouth sucking a brand along her skin.

Winterfell looms far and unreachable over the hills in a still twilight, the promise of dawn like a threat at their backs. Ramsay waits for them even now, ready to paint the snows red come morning.

Sansa squeezes her eyes shut tightly, arching against Jon, nails digging into his back.

The winter air is frigid and striking, but beneath her palms he is warm. He is constant.

He is her brother.

She does not let herself think this when he spends inside her, grunting out his release beneath a slew of curses.

(If she listens closely enough, she'll hear her name among them – but she isn't ready for that, not even now – here, at the end.)

In the morning, the snows may run red. The Starks may fall.

But tonight, she is warm. Tonight, she is safe. Tonight, she is not alone.

They take what they need, and do not think of the after.

* * *

When he leaves for the field, he does not look back.

She is copper-crowned and winter-fierce along the horizon of their camp.

(She was coal-hot and wolfish just hours before – pressed up against him in ways he should be too ashamed to recall quite so keenly.)

Jon closes his eyes and breathes deep, hands tightening over his reins. When he opens his eyes, Winterfell is still grey in the distance, and he is still a bastard son.

He wonders when it all began to change. When he began to want more.

Death had unmade him, perhaps – too sharply and grotesquely to be put back together as anything less than wrong.

(As wrong as the sweet tang of his sister's sweat along his tongue.)

Jon licks his lips, remembering.

And then instantly – with the swiftness of finality – he forgets.

Jon marches to battle, ready for the end. He does not look back.

(He looks back just the once.)

* * *

Ramsay's jaw shatters beneath Jon's fist. Again, and again, and again. An arc of red as he spits blood – a demented laugh breaking along his lips, eyes lolling back into his head.

Jon hits him again. A sharp crack of his knuckles on bone. Even through the gloves, the grime, the unspeakable soil of death caked into his skin, Jon feels that crack – like a bell, ringing through the air as sharp and bitter as their victory.

Again, and again, and again, and –

The edge of her cloak breaks into his periphery and he's glancing over, wavering, staggering with his knees in the mud, eyes wild as they drag up, and up, and up, and then there – _there she is_ – still copper-crowned and winter fierce, but now she is also coal-hot and wolfish for everyone to see, and a dangerous thrum of possessiveness lights his tongue beneath the blood and bile – harsh enough to throw him back on his haunches, slumping into the mud with his hand still bunched in Ramsay's collar, his other held mid-air and –

"Jon."

He looks up into the sky and breathes deep, draws the air into his aching lungs like the first breath after drowning.

His fists never truly unfurl.

* * *

She's in the room with the dead body. The dead boy.

_Rickon_, she tells herself.

But his skin is too purple-swollen and his hair is too matted dark and he will never open those Tully blue eyes again.

This is not her brother, she thinks.

"Sansa." Jon's tender hand is at her elbow.

She laughs – bitten off and sharp.

Jon flinches beneath the sound, resonant in the room.

"Ramsay was wrong." The desperation fills her, thrumming through her bones. She quakes beneath her winter-flushed skin. "This is not our brother."

"Sansa," Jon says again, the rebuke in his voice drowned out by the anguish.

She laughs again, and his hand tightens on her elbow. "Stop saying that name," she whispers.

He tugs her to him and she protests his embrace with bunched fists at his chest. "Stop," she seethes.

"Sansa." He winds a hand into her hair, gripping fiercely beneath the thin veneer of stoicism.

"_Stop_," and then she's crying, so swiftly and suddenly it comes out like another delirious laugh, -high-strung and broken. "Stop saying that name, Jon, it's _Rickon_. It's Rickon!" she shrieks, struggling in his grasp, and she yanks back, taking him with her. Her back hits the wall, his chest crashing into hers.

He buries his face in her neck, his hands at her wrists. "Sansa!" She cannot see the tears lining his eyes.

"It's Rickon! Our _brother_, Jon, our – gods, but our _little brother_." She wails against him, thrashing, and he presses his whole weight into her, bracing her back against the cold stone.

"Sansa, _Sansa_!"

She wants to kick his teeth in suddenly, wants to silence that useless, contemptable mouth of his.

She only wants him to stop.

She arches against him, pushing him off just enough to catch his jaw with her lips, to lick her way to his mouth, swallow his unexpected moan behind her gnashing teeth.

He sighs into the kiss, fingers uncurling from her wrists to grip at her hips in a kind of familiarity that should be indecent. He leaves her mouth for her throat, tongue hot and wet along her pulse.

From over his shoulder, Sansa catches sight of Rickon laid out on the table across the room. The sob rakes along her throat to air. "Our little brother," she moans grievously, eyes squeezing shut beneath the salt sting of tears. And then she's slumping against him, and Jon's back tenses beneath her biting nails. He slides his hands up from her hips, cradling her back, the heat gone from him instantly, his sigh broken and ragged against her throat.

He holds her as she cries.

He does not call her name.

* * *

He doesn't know how to _not die_, he finds. And it's a strange sort of revelation. Because he'd been so ready for it, so sure. Death has been his only constant since he first stepped foot in Castle Black. A dead horde at their door. Dead brothers on the pyre. A dead lover across the wall.

Dead vows beneath a hangman's noose.

He feels a charlatan in his own skin.

Distantly, Jon realizes he's been stalking Winterfell's halls, intent, meaningful in his stride. He finds himself stopped outside Sansa's door.

His chest constricts, his throat tightening beneath the weight of words he doesn't know how to bring to air.

He doesn't know how to not die, he finds.

But he doesn't know how to live either.

Jon leaves without knocking.

* * *

The lords filter from the hall. Jon lingers, watching Sansa. She taps a thoughtful finger along the armrest of her chair, lips pursed tight.

"You'd make a good Hand, you know," he says without realizing the words are on his tongue.

Sansa arches a brow his way, her tapping stilled. "Not a queen?"

There's another conversation happening here – one Jon is in no mood to humor. He clears his throat and looks out over the empty hall. "I have something for you." He fumbles in his pocket for the bundle, a small pack of herbs wrapped in off-white cloth, tied with a fraying brown string.

Sansa takes it quietly, eyes fixed to the parcel.

Jon clears his throat again. "It's –

"Moon tea," she whispers, thumb sliding over the frayed string like something tender.

Jon stares at her for many moments, quietly bereft. "It's for… for when I…" He lets his explanation fragment off, swallowing his words back behind an unpracticed tongue, standing swiftly.

"For when you spilled inside me," she finishes for him, voice firm, eyes flicking up to meet his.

Jon's throat flexes with his control, looking down at her from his position.

Sansa's mouth thins into a harsh line as she rises as well, and Jon is lightheaded at her sudden proximity, the breath pooling tight in his chest.

She turns the parcel over in her hand, eyeing it with calculated interest. "And how much does one take? For how long? Does this cover a second turn? Will there _be_ a second turn?" she asks pointedly, brow arched, so close – impossibly close – and Jon finds his hands moving of their own volition. He grips at her arms, holding her back, away from him.

Away from this air he breathes.

"Sansa," he says warningly, body coiled tight.

She pushes back against his hold, voice seethed through clenched teeth. "Tell me, Jon. How many more times can you fuck me before I need another dose?"

A deep, resonant growl breaks from his chest as he shoves her back against the table, trapping her there, his hips pinned to hers threateningly, his grip digging into her arms.

She stares back at him defiantly. Winter seems to pass through her gaze – harsh and unrelenting. A thousand years and yet too, too soon, her voice is ringing out, hissed between wolf teeth he knows the bite of intimately, "You can't even say the words, Jon, how can you – "

He silences her vile mouth with his own needful one, releasing her arms only to hook his hands beneath her thighs and hoist her up atop the table, stumbling into her, shoving his hips between her parted legs, rucking up her skirts as he bites at her, sucks on her tongue, licks her up like a man starved.

She gasps into his mouth, hands winding around his shoulders, her quiet moan choked off at the tongue.

Jon breaks from her violently, one hand shoving her skirts up around her waist while his other fists in her hair. "Is that what you want me to say, Sansa? You want me to tell you how I _enjoyed_ fucking you? My own sister? How I think about it every night when I take myself in hand? How I would fuck you again – gladly?"

Sansa grips at his tunic, panting, keeping him pressed to her.

Jon snarls against her mouth, one hand dangerously high on her thigh, his fingers digging bruises into her flesh. "Is that what you want me to tell you?"

"No," she says on a harsh breath, and Jon has only a moment to swallow back that burning shame, that ripe depravity, before she's reaching between them and cupping his hardness with sure fingers. He bucks into her hand without warning.

"I want you to _show_ me," she urges, tongue flicking out the wet her lips.

The moon tea tumbles to the cold stone, forgotten.

* * *

Baelish keeps his distance. He does not trail his fingers across her knuckles anymore, or brush the hair from her shoulder, or lean into her shadow when he breathes his poison in her ear.

He keeps a watchful eye on the King in the North.

Sansa feels a flush of exhilaration at the notion, even when she knows she shouldn't.

Even when she wears the mark of Jon's avarice beneath the collar of her dress and sits before the Northern lords like a false maiden.

This will not last. It _cannot_ last, she thinks.

This frantic haze will lift one day, and they will part – perhaps slowly, perhaps with waning affection. Like a bruise, the stain of their lust will fade until her flesh is free of him entirely.

Like he'd never been there at all.

It cannot last, she thinks, surely –

Fearfully.

* * *

"Your mother would be proud of you."

Sansa stiffens beside him, never looking at him. She keeps her gaze on the snowy horizon past the ramparts. She steals a sharp, steadying breath through her nose. "Do not speak of her."

Jon bows his head.

Sansa's eyes are cold and unblinking amidst the snow. She turns to him. "Do not _ever_ speak of her," she says lowly.

Jon opens his mouth, but he doesn't get a word out before she's bunching a hand in his collar and dragging him to her, kissing him there blatantly atop the ramparts, a snarl caught behind her tongue, swift and pointed and ending with a bite along his lower lip.

She pulls away nearly as quickly as she had leant in. "Not with that mouth," she hisses in reproach, and he barely catches the sheen of wetness over her eyes before she releases him, turning away.

He stands there watching her retreat, blood heated, mouth wet with her taste.

* * *

Most nights, it's her that comes to his chambers. It's her who drags the thin material of her shift past her shoulders and onto the floor. It's her who clambers into his lap and pants out her release with a hand clamped tightly to the nape of his neck and her thighs quaking over his hips, riding him out until he sees white and spills her name into the crook of her neck.

Most nights he's already hard and waiting for her when he hears the telltale clack of his door unlatching.

But some nights –

Some nights the madness is sharp and unspeakable on his tongue. Some nights he takes her like a punishment – his or hers, he cannot know.

Some nights he wonders how exactly she's managed to reduce him to this – needy and frantic and possessed.

Some nights he wonders if maybe it wasn't death that carved such beastliness from him.

Perhaps he's been wrong from the start.

* * *

Sansa watches Jon sparring in the courtyard. Preparations for the war have not stopped, and so neither will he. From her place atop the ramparts, Sansa keeps a gloved palm along the rail and watches with a detached sort of understanding.

"My lady, I must speak." Brienne's voice is firm but warm behind her, and Sansa closes her eyes, remembering what refuge feels like, what shelter means in a home that bled her.

"If you must," she answers softly, no heat behind the words. She opens her eyes and slips her hand from the rail.

Brienne steps up beside her, one hand perpetually on the hilt of her sword.

It stays something restless in Sansa.

"There has been… talk."

Sansa only raises a brow for her to continue.

Brienne glances down into the courtyard, a glint of disapproval passing through her gaze as she eyes Jon. "Talk that His Grace has been…dishonorable with you."

Something warms in Sansa at the way Brienne quietly glares at Jon, even as she shakes her head beneath a soft laugh.

"My lady." Brienne's eyes are on hers again, guardedly fond, the censure absent from her gaze where it was visceral and stark for Jon. Concern laces her tone. "I would not have dared to speak of such if I didn't think your honor…compromised…by such vile rumors. It is not right of him – to bring your reputation into question. These rumors must be stamped out. And quickly."

Sansa lets out an exhausted breath, the smile strained and wavering along her lips.

Oh, but if she knew. If she only knew the shameful things she let Jon do to her. If she only knew the foul way she craved it.

She steps closer to Brienne and reaches for her hand, gripping it in her cold fingers. "You are too good to me."

An anguished, helpless look passes over Brienne's features, and Sansa misses her mother suddenly – intensely.

She clamps the feeling down beneath a worn heart.

Brienne turns Sansa's palm over in her own calloused one, her grip affectionate even in its caution. "My lady, the whispers are not kind to you," she says quietly, a ring of sorrow lining the words.

"Oh Brienne," she sighs out, reaching a hand up to cup her cheek. "When have whispers ever been kind?"

Brienne's gaze falls to their clasped hands. She pulls a deep breath in, lets it to air, looks back at her lady. She has no answer for her.

Sansa lets her hand slip from Brienne's cheek. She cannot look at her anymore.

Not without tasting bile at the back of her throat. Not without letting that ripe, pungent guilt seep into her skin like a sickness.

* * *

"That will be all, Ser Davos."

Silence. And then the soft rustle of fabric.

Jon looks up from his desk, quill stilled in his hand. Davos remains in the room, hands held behind his back in deference.

"Was there something else?"

Davos seems to hesitate, pursing his lips in consideration.

Something sinks inside him, and instantly, Jon knows what the man is here to say to him. His fingers tighten over his quill, a drop of dark ink falling to the parchment, blossoming black beneath his stilled hand.

"Your Grace," Davos begins, stops, starts again. "Your sister, the Lady of Winterfell…" He huffs, struggling with the words, shoulders straightening. "If I may – "

"You may not," Jon bites out evenly, still as the grave, eyes dark and unblinking. Another drop of ink.

Davos' brows dip down in a harsh furrow. "Your Grace – "

"That will be all," Jon repeats, this time louder, a snap of finality to the words.

Davos sighs, arms sliding out from behind his back. "Yes, Your Grace," he says resignedly, turning to leave and closing the door behind him.

Jon returns to his letter to find the dark splatter of forgotten ink wetting the parchment, a vibrant bloom of black marking his words.

He crumples the paper and throws it to the roaring fire.

The stain has already set in.

* * *

"What if we're it? The last of the Starks?" she asks with her back to him, sitting at the edge of the bed with her knees pressed up to her breasts, her copper hair falling over her bare back.

Jon stirs behind her, sitting up against the headboard. He does not answer her.

She doesn't even know what answer she wants from him, really. Perhaps none is better. Perhaps in silence she can pretend there _is_ an answer to such a question.

The quiet lingers between them, so acutely unbearable this time that she feels it festering beneath her skin. And then there's the rustle of furs as Jon moves to her, a calloused palm at the base of her spine, his lips at her shoulder. "Come back to bed." It is not a command.

It should be, she thinks.

Her brows furrow, her lips pinching tight. She doesn't like this tone of his – this tenderness. Not here, when she's naked in his bed. Never here.

The tears are sudden along her lids, but they never fall. "Gods, I miss Arya. That vile, wretched girl," she half-scoffs, half-laughs.

(A disbelieving kind of scoff. A shaken kind of laugh.)

Another press of his lips to her shoulder, shifting higher, angling up her neck. Sansa sucks in a sharp breath and turns to him, her legs falling from where they pressed against her breasts to dangle over the edge of the bed. She curls a hand in his hair like a threat and stills his face just a breath from hers. "Don't do that," she gets out on a wavering exhale.

Jon's eyes travel down her form, one hand flexing over her hip, and then down along her inner thigh with blatant intent. "Then what do you want me to do?" he rasps out, fingers dipping into her.

Sansa arches against his touch, a silent hiss passing through her clenched teeth.

Jon's eyes darken, his tongue darting out to wet his lips.

If they are the last of the Starks, then so be it, Sansa thinks. The world cannot condemn her for this loneliness. It cannot condemn her for this sin. Not when they are all that's left to each other.

"Make me forget," Sansa chokes out, and Jon drags her down to the furs, mouth open and hot and ruthless on her skin.

She fists her hands in his hair, anchoring him to her as he drags his mouth lower. "I don't want to miss them anymore," she pants out, legs parting instinctively. Jon moans desperately into the curve of her hip. "Make me forget," she demands once more, impatient, lonesome – _lost_.

And so, he does.

The next morning, Meera Reed drags a half-conscious Bran through Winterfell's gates.

* * *

"It isn't my crown," Bran says softly, eyes vacant.

Jon furrows his brows and leans over to grasp Bran's hand atop the armrests of his chair. "Bran, you're Father's last trueborn son."

His brother does not grasp him back. "And yet it's still not my crown."

The fire crackles in the pervading silence of Jon's solar, spitting heat at them like an accusation.

Jon licks his lips, hand retreating. "Bran – "

"You weren't particularly concerned with trueborn lineage when the lords passed me over for you," Sansa bites out from her place beside them.

Jon snaps his heated gaze to her, but finds she isn't looking at him. She's smoothing over the lines of her skirt before clasping her hands together in her lap demurely. She looks to Bran, chin raised.

"This isn't the time, Sansa," he mutters lowly.

She scoffs, and how he wishes she'd slide those cold eyes his way. "And when will the 'right' time be?"

An irritated huff leaves him. "Why do you even want to talk about this now?" He wants to shake her suddenly. And worse.

"Precisely because you _won't_," she snaps.

"Because painting you a thief is easier for her than admitting to what she's given you," Bran cuts in, voice unbearably steady, and Jon whips his head to his younger brother so swiftly his neck nearly cracks.

More silence. A log crumbles to cinders in the hearth like an exhale.

Jon's eyes narrow to slits. "_What?_" he whispers. He doesn't see the way Sansa tightens her hands in her lap, her throat bobbing beneath her heavy swallow, eyes never leaving their brother.

Bran drags impassive eyes from the fireplace to Jon. "It doesn't matter. The dead do not require a crown."

The cold reminder sets Jon's jaw to locking, his hand curling into a fist atop his knee. He glances to Sansa. She's decidedly staring through the frost-lined window, lips pursed.

He sighs, rubbing a hand over his mouth. "Aye," he says, fist slowly unfurling.

Because Bran is right – perhaps on both accounts.

He doesn't admit to the part of him that exults in Bran's denial of the crown – the part of him that has long known how deep his desires run, how dark.

He chances another glance at Sansa.

She leaves the room that night without ever once having looked at him.

* * *

"Say what you mean," Sansa demands of Bran, standing at the edge of the clearing. The godswood is blindingly white around them, save for the lurid shade of red the weirwood offers. The heart tree stares at her – condemning. She ignores it.

Bran turns his head at her voice, eyes alighting along hers and oh – her chest aches.

(She wonders if she's a terrible person for having forgotten the shape of his face, the lilt of his voice, the petulant way he'd fight against her kisses. She wonders if maybe she doesn't deserve to be anyone's sister anymore.)

"About me. About Jon and… me."

Bran continues to stare at her, quietly musing, but nothing passes over his face except the flickering shadow of the weirwood's branches in the winter wind.

Her nails cut half-moons into her palms when she clenches her fists at her sides. Her tongue is heavy in her mouth, her throat dry. She swallows back the trepidation, spine stiffening like a watchful wolf. "I'm fucking him, Bran."

The only response she gets is a minutely raised brow. He doesn't even flinch at the snow pelting his cheeks.

She's angry suddenly, violently, tartly – _angry_. She nearly sobs her words. "_Say_ something, Bran, please."

"What do you want me to say?" he offers her, so softly the wind almost carries the words away.

She steps closer, chest rising with her shaking breaths. "Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me… tell me _this is wrong_. Please, I need – I need to…." She looks down, blinks away the sudden wetness, sucks a soldiering breath through her chapped lips. "Tell me what a ruin I've made. Tell me I'm wrong for needing him like this – our…our _brother_." She screws her eyes shut, taking a single, charged breath into her quaking lungs. She looks back up.

"He's not our brother," Bran says instead, and Sansa feels the air rushing from her like a bout of drowning.

She doesn't have long to think on it though because then –

"But that wouldn't have stopped you, would it?"

Her mind shutters up, blocking out the light, collapsing in on itself. The realization clatters around her skull like a death knell.

When she leaves the clearing, fists stiff at her sides, she doesn't even have the sense to question Bran's rejection of Jon as a brother. She has only this:

_But that wouldn't have stopped you, would it?_

Sansa stumbles in the snow, stops, sucks sweet winter air through her nose, hand braced to a tree for balance.

The truth burrows into her like an animal, like a savage thing – until it hollows her out.

Until the only thing that may fill her is _him_.

(Because no, it wouldn't have stopped her.)

* * *

Jon is through with this game of hers, this avoidance. Something inside him howls for her, and he has smothered it long enough. She doesn't get to play the proper lady this time, even with their returned brother.

She doesn't get to deny this.

(Because he never could.)

"Jon, we – we can't." She braces back against the stone wall, shaking her head, lip caught between her teeth.

It doesn't stay his hands, and her breath hitches as he rucks up her skirts, already palming her thighs.

"Why not?" He's breathless, aching, practically _trembling_ against her. They have always taken what they needed from each other. And he has always needed her.

So he takes.

Sansa shakes her head, eyes wet, her mouth opening but finding no words.

He doesn't stop – could never stop – and then his fingers curl up into her heat so frantically, so recklessly, she's gasping against his mouth –

And she loses all reason to find words.

His mouth is on hers then, honor a long dead thing in the wake of such craving.

He breaks from her, chest heaving, his fingers moving inside her as he pants against her mouth. "You kiss back, Sansa," he says like an accusation, words a grated hiss. "You always have."

The sob breaks from her, and she doesn't let him say more, curling a fist in his tunic and dragging him back to her.

Sometime in the night, she forgets why she had ever protested in the first place.

* * *

It finds its way between her ribs, clawing beneath bone and taking root in the tender flesh of her heart.

She looks at Jon.

He looks at her.

Yes, she thinks, it has long taken root.

Pull him out from the stem and you will find the bloody, rending hole he leaves behind.

Sansa understands now that there is no going back.

* * *

A dragon queen sails for Westeros. The dead march ever closer. And the North hears tell of a faceless girl slaying Cersei in her own bedchamber.

Bran keeps a tight lip. "After," he tells Jon and Sansa, eyes like an endless winter. "When the battle is won, I will tell you all."

They can do little more than prepare, in the end.

They reach for each other like practiced pain – like pressing on a bruise.

An affirmation of survival.

And she is still waiting for the fade,

fade,

fade –


End file.
